Beware Of Pity Quotes
"Absolutely central to his fiction is the subject of obsession."
"In the process, Zweig gives us a piercing analysis of the motives underlying pity."
"We learn to view the world not just as a scene of pomp, but as a place of neuroticism."
"The world offered itself to me like a fruit, beautiful and rich with promise."
"The courage that comes of being one of a herd is compounded of vanity, recklessness, and fear."
"Courage is often nothing but inverted weakness."
"The greatest heroes often conceal the most questionable motives."
"To live in a halo of glory seems unnatural and unendurable."
"The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers they are perfectly aware of."
"A distinction of that kind only had any point in our military world."
"It was a dirty trick of fate to make me yearn for something impossible."
"The happiest day of my life would be to see Pavlova dance."
"I dance in my dreams, and perhaps it's a good thing that what happened to me, happened."
"A great deal of fear – yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action."
"Most of those reputed to be the bravest at the front were very questionable heroes."
"To be a hero for twenty minutes – probably no more courageously than thousands of others."
"Pity, in its weak and sentimental kind, is really the heart's impatience to be rid of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness."
"What feels true are the scenes in which we are shown the futility of pity."
"All right then, I’ll go, although there’s no point in it, absolutely no point. Excuse me, Herr Leutnant, I hope you’ll come again soon."
"‘Help me,’ she ordered him and threw off the fur rug."
"Josef shall help me up. Then I can walk by myself."
"‘Please don’t be offended with the child, Herr Leutnant, for being a little brusque, but … you don’t know how much she’s had to go through in all these years … always some new treatment, and the whole thing is so terribly slow.'"
"‘If you only knew what the child used to be like! She was on the move all day long, rushing up and down the stairs all over the place until our hearts were in our mouths.'"
"And to think that that should happen to her, her of all people …"
"‘How easy it is even today to make her happy! She can take a childish pleasure in the slightest little thing.'"
"‘I’m quite sure no one is more wretched than she herself at having behaved with such lack of self-control … But how is she … how is she to control herself?'"
"‘I don’t want your sacrifices. I don’t want you to feel you have to dole out your daily dose of pity — I don’t care two straws for you all and your precious pity.'"
"When one is old, one has only to look at a person to know him through and through."
"We’re all brought up to respect doctors, we read in the papers of the miracles they’re able to perform."
"He has a kind of passion to get the better of an illness."
"I realized then that here was a man who lived and died with every one of his patients."
"How could God go so wide of the mark and strike the wrong one, an innocent creature?"
"It’s no use being pacific, you’re never done with quarrels and disputes."
"Sometimes, when the tears rushed to his eyes he would turn away abruptly like this."
"People are terrible where money’s concerned. Terrible. I never knew that before."
"You must discover someone who won’t give you bonds and promissory notes… make certain of your money and get a proper price."
"The best thing you can do is to start by going to bed early tonight."
"The estimated value is, after all, no more than a figure to go upon, a very vague figure, of course."
"It may be that I have already told you too much, Herr Leutnant, at any rate more than I originally intended."
"No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbour lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence."
"And now pay careful attention to what I say. The day before yesterday one of our foremost biochemists read a paper to the Medical Society in which he told us that in America and in the laboratories of one or two other countries attempts to find a gland extract for the cure of diabetes had met with considerable success."
"Everything is possible, even the impossible — for where the medical science of today stands before a locked door another door is sometimes unexpectedly opened."
"A doctor who from the outset accepts the concept 'incurable' is funking his job, capitulating before the battle begins."
"When riding along as part of a column of cavalry one does not exist as a separate entity; the clatter of hundreds of hoofs prevents one from either thinking clearly or day-dreaming."
"Just as a speaker finds himself genuinely carried away by the enthusiasm aroused by his own hollow phrases, so now did the confidence which was born solely of my own exaggeration take firmer and firmer root in my own mind."
"But I refused to admit the thought to my consciousness. Why worry as to whether I had said too much or too little? Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime."
"I had been perfectly happy the whole of this long golden summer day; anything more could only diminish my happiness."
"Better to walk home now down the familiar avenue, my spirit tranquillized like the warm, summer air after the burning day."
"There's no turning back. It is my duty to give you due warning beforehand."
"Only when one is prepared to sacrifice oneself in doing so — and then only!"
"You can't dispel illusions as easily as you shake down the quicksilver in a thermometer."
"One must have an inexhaustible fund of patience, that one can help one’s fellows."
"But we mustn’t let such an illusion go on flourishing like a weed."
"It is always simple people who are most shocked at the realization that misfortune sometimes does not shrink from laying a grim hand even on the rich."
"And when I can’t stand it any more, I know how to get rid of you all."
"I’d rather die than allow myself to be pitied!"
"But it was too late. There in the salon Ilona was waiting; evidently she had heard me coming."
"I felt like one who, stooping innocently over a flower, is stung by an adder."
"Never had I, even in my wildest dreams, imagined that invalids, cripples, the immature, the prematurely aged, the despised and rejected, the pariahs among human beings, dared to love."
"For a young and inexperienced person almost invariably forms a picture of real life and experience that is a reflection of the world of which he has heard or read in books."
"It was only because it had seemed to me that anything of an erotic nature was precluded in our relations from the start, and because I had never so much as suspected that Edith could look upon me as anything more than a nice boy, a good friend, that I had been able to preserve such an innocent, light-hearted friendship with the two girls."
"Only now did it occur to me why it was she had been so infuriated whenever I had blithely called her ‘my dear child’."
"Speed has at once a stimulating and a numbing effect on both the mind and the body."
"In all our actions vanity is, after all, one of the most powerful driving forces, and weak natures in particular succumb to the temptation to do something which, viewed superficially, makes them appear strong, courageous and resolute."
"For the first time in my life I had an opportunity of showing my comrades that I was someone with some self-respect, in fact no end of a fellow!"
"Whatever is this? I thought, feeling inside the pocket. But even as I did so my fingers shrank back as though they had realized before my brain what this forgotten packet was."
"I believe it was not so much a feeling of horror as of boundless shame."
"In reality I was running away from the Kekesfalvas, from my own dishonesty, my responsibilities."
"What the devil does it matter to me, I said angrily to myself, if she’s waiting and whining?"
"He’s paid to cure the sick. She’s his patient, not mine."
"As I ran out I repeated the address twice, three times, to myself."
"But one must try. That’s what one lives for. For that alone."
"It’s worth while taking a hard task upon oneself if thereby one makes life easier for another person."
"All that I possess I should leave to you both."
"You must help her! You are the only one who can help her."
"She’ll do something desperate, she’ll do away with herself!"
"No, stay where you are, please don’t trouble."
"She can’t be left in the state she’s in now."
"I swear to you, it’s a matter of life and death!"
"Why, when she is cured, then I shall of course come and ask you."
"I have done everything that lies in my power."
"I thought Aunt Daisy had fallen out with Ferdinand."
"Aren’t you going to introduce your bride to us?"
"For the first time I felt grateful to the Colonel for saving me."
"I knew that from now on I was bound for life to one person alone, to the woman who loved me."
"Her countenance now shone with love and human sympathy."
"The devotion of another was to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a bracelet on the arm."
"Only those with whom life had dealt hardly...could really be helped by love."
"He who devoted his life to them atoned to them for what life had taken from them."
"They alone knew how to love and be loved as one should love and be loved — gratefully and humbly."
"I had done the right thing. I had saved myself, I had saved someone else."
"I, however, saw in this unanimous silence universal condemnation."
"In the vast blood-bath of the war my own private guilt had been absorbed into the general guilt."
"I felt like a murderer who has buried the corpse of his victim in a wood."
"Since no one reminded me of it, I myself forgot my guilt."
"But ever since that moment I have realized afresh that no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it."